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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#611

Post by pasbesoin »

oatmealsnap wrote: post #574
agumonkey wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of work, the extent for how long they've been doing so, all relative to the funding they got.. it's even painful to think about. Chrome shadowed them overnight, had Google infinite wallet and started from scratch. Mozilla became the old slug.. Since then they got Rust off ground, servo yielding good fruits, firefox cool n quiet. Once again kudos.

Sorry, that’s just not what happened. I think there’s an important lesson in what happened to Mozilla, so I think it is worth clarifying. Chrome didn’t start from scratch (they used WebKit to start) and they didn’t overtake them overnight. Mozilla couldn’t decide what their focus should be for many years, and in that time Chrome grew thanks to Google’s infinite wallet. They made worthwhile risks that didn’t work out…

Both Chrome and Safari started with extant, open-source projects.

A rich set of lessons in what tends to happen with corporate uptake of a "common good".

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#612

Post by mhartl »

Arubis wrote: post #30

Boy, I _really_ didn't want to swap to Chrome. I'd held on through about a year ago, even despite knowing it was slower, a memory hog, and so on; at least this way, _someone_ on my team was viewing our site in FF and would notice discrepancies. I hated to let Google manage yet another aspect of my life. But as some point, too much was too much. Unable to bear vanilla, Google-owned Chrome, I ended up in (closed-source…

OT, but (in case you didn't know) you can use asterisks to italicize text, so instead of _this_ you'll have this.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#614

Post by ido »

int_19h wrote: post #470
ZenoArrow wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Firefox OS could've found a niche on low-end phones. There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI, Mozilla wasn't even the first to try it (the Palm Pre got there first). Also, there are tons of phone apps that are just websites in an application wrapper, so it's not like they had to start from scratch to build up their app ecosystem. Lastly, whilst Mozilla…

> There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.

It was also a really bad implementation. I developed for the firefox os reference phone before the launch - it was atrociously slow.

Think low end android phone (of the time!) running software that was 10x slower than android's.

It's really hard to describe how slow it was if you didn't personally use a firefox os phone. There were times when it felt significantly slower than a 386 running windows 3.11.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#615

Post by late2part »

CydeWeys wrote: post #547
ce4 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buzz, Wave, Orkut, Talk, Hangouts, Google Plus, Allo, Duo, forced YouTube comments merge to G+

Duo is certainly not "failed"; it's actually doing very well internationally. It has the best video quality at the least bandwidth. If I launched an app that got over a hundred million downloads and had many millions of monthly users I certainly wouldn't call that a failure!

Duo is an MFA. Whatever GOOG did that's called Duo failed because I don't know what it is.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#616

Post by cup-of-tea »

I never switched from Firefox. I have no idea why everyone else did. Chrome had fewer extensions, wasn't faster and was a huge security risk. I can't remember Firefox ever having a problem with speed. I say that as someone who is unhappy if a command line tool takes more than a few milliseconds to do its thing. I think all that happened is people tried Chrome because Google told them to, and they found it was faster because they had a hundred extensions in Firefox and none in Chrome.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#617

Post by cup-of-tea »

sleavey wrote: post #497

I don't know what everyone's problem was with Firefox. I never noticed significant slow down with the browser, or at least the slow down I saw I blamed on Javascript bloat on websites these days (it started around the time Bootstrap and jQuery really took off). I was even running Adblock+ / later uBlock, had lots of tabs open all the time and browsed heavy websites. I remember reading that comic that Google made to d…

I'm certain that people thought Chrome was faster because they went from a Firefox with loads of extensions and browser history etc. to a fresh Chrome. My experience has been the same as yours: Firefox has never been slower than Chrome.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#618

Post by lol768 »

riquito wrote: post #291
digi_owl wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically a wrapper around Webview, that in turn is chrome based...

That's true on IOS but on Android is the real thing

I think https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/13 is the relevant tracking issue.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#620

Post by fasquoika »

IanCal wrote: post #508
wruza wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half is actually good chance, why didn't you invest in all of them?

1. I'm not a venture capitalist and startups don't/can't generally accept small investments. 2. I thought they were bloody stupid ideas. I'm not convinced that investing in ideas I think are stupid because things I have previously thought were stupid did well is a sound strategy. All it shows is I'm bad at predicting what will do well, so it makes more sense for me to invest broadly across as many markets as possible…

Your comment reminded me of this xkcd. https://xkcd.com/1497/
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